Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance announced today a working group to develop and promote an open connectivity standard for smart home devices.
Connected Home Over IP
The project, called Connected Home Over IP, wants to define a set of IP networking technologies for device certification. This would be a step towards better security for smart home devices, which are often notoriously insecure. It also wants to make it easier for companies to create smart home and voice products that are compatible with each other.
The industry working group will take an open-source approach for the development and implementation of a new, unified connectivity protocol. The project intends to use contributions from market-tested smart home technologies from Amazon, Apple, Google, Zigbee Alliance, and others. The decision to leverage these technologies is expected to accelerate the development of the protocol, and deliver benefits to manufacturers and consumers faster.
The project notes that many smart home devices use proprietary communication protocols. It wants to build a new standard using IP because that’s already the protocol that the internet uses with “battle tested algorithms and infrastructure for performing routing, switching and firewalling in robust and resilient ways.“
If security with certification is not part of the standards then it’s all meaningless!
How about ones that are not constantly “updating” and can respond. Oh, and no more proprietary hubs